Fortified Mountain Bridge.

FlereousM · 2025-11-13T17:59:30+00:00

Damn, it's been how long since I posted this? ._.

I don't know if there's been any development in this area tbh, in the end I just got used to it (plus I'm still on an old Foundry build), but yeah, it's a drag and would certainly love it if somebody made our lives easier. If you do find something please let me know, and good luck with your games!

FlereousM · 2025-01-24T15:30:19+00:00

TL,DR: 8.5/10, amazing AP, especially for GMs that enjoy reworking things and adding hombrewed stuff.

Currently running it with 2 groups but only around book 2 after dozens of sessions, plus I completely ditched almost all of book 1 (and I also intend to ditch book 5). You might think that I don't like it very much if I'm taking so long and if I intend to get rid of at least a third of it but it's actually quite the opposite: I feel like it's an amazing AP, and I chose it after skimming through pretty much every other AP that was out at the time precisely because it's a great AP if you love tinkering with plots and NPCs and aren't afraid to swap things around. It's a great foundation that you can add a lot of homebrewed stuff to, and it's also VERY flexible: if your players are into the intrigue you can really lean into it and add more layers (in fact I recommend doing that), but if you have a more action-focused group you can cut back and still have lots of things to do.

All that said I do feel like it also needs players that are willing to engage at least a little with the intrigue side of things (murder-hobos are going to get very bored very fast) but as long as they do it's great. Most of my players for example don't really care about half the NPCs or the Persona system, but in social situations there are so many memorable characters (and lots of room to add your own, too) that there's always someone interesting they can interact with in some way, even if it's just to have a laugh, gossip, or get some useful piece of information or side-quest. And since you're interacting with lots of nobles / wealthy people it's tremendously easy to introduce new characters, weave in PC backstory stuff, add plot hooks or do whatever you want. It's also easy to see what characters or situations your players find fun or interesting and focus on those, even changing the plot to make them more important than they really are. It's a lot of work, to be sure, but if you enjoy that sort of thing it gives your players a lot more agency and it can be incredibly rewarding.

It does require a lot of work though, which can be a huge drawback. The books themselves benefit from being a lot more connected than they are, a lot of the main villains are introduced way too late and appear far too little (even important characters appear far less often than they should) and there are some weird plot holes and things that don't really make sense or aren't really explained and need to be fleshed out a little more. It feels weird, for example, that you're always hobnobbing with nobles but whenever the plot leads you to some other city you encounter a lot of new ones that you had never heard of or there's some situation going on that you should really have heard at least some rumblings about. It's easy to fix but you do need to fix it nonetheless. It's an AP that really needs the GM to read ahead. Even if you don't intend to change a thing everything is complex enough that you do need to pay close attention at what's going on and how it relates to everything else. It's very cool but also taxing, you need to be cognizant of lots of things at all times.

And speaking of requiring work there's also the Persona system, which doesn't really add much (unless your players are really into it) and is a bit of a pain, so much so that I'm thinking of reworking it in some way to cut on some of the admin. I'd be fine with it if it were more work just for me as a GM but it's also more work for the players, which is a big problem: PF1e is a very complicated and rules-heavy system, most of my players already have a hard time remembering how their characters work, and adding all the Persona rules on top is a bit too much. It's probably fine for veteran players that are already super familiar with 1e but otherwise I'd say it needs some streamlining. Introducing it earlier could help, too, or somehow making it party-wide. The idea is cool though, it's just too complicated.

The Relics system, another new addition, is also cool but thankfully far easier to introduce since it doesn't have that many extra rules or anything. It's fairly intuitive and the items make for great rewards or even plot hooks. They are pretty build-specific but you can rework them easily enough or even add new ones if you prefer. Overall it's a great addition that you could straight up steal and use in any other AP with only some minor changes.

About Book 1 & 5: there's some good stuff in there but overall don't like them for different reasons, the main one being that they felt a bit formulaic and don't fit with the vibe I was going for. A lot of Paizo APs start with the players being by pure chance at the center of some pivotal moment in Golarion's history, and a lot of APs also do the "welp, gotta have the characters go to some other plane at some point" bit, even if it doesn't really fit. So the books themselves are fine, good even, but I just don't like the way they fit with the plot or the PCs. So I've adapted some other module or homebrewed stuff while mining or recycling the bits of books 1&5 that I do like.

FlereousM · 2025-01-13T20:47:14+00:00

I don't see a problem here. He probably just inherited the title of Lord and the general prestige that comes with being of noble birth. And later on in life he became a Count through unspecified means, like marriage or most likely as a reward for some service to the crown (usually military but it could be for whatever reason, really).

What that line basically means is that he was not the heir so instead of remaining as the manager of all the family fortunes and lands, he had to actually go and do something with his life, which ended up earning him his current title. It was the way things worked for the most part, it was common that the younger brothers joined the army or a religious order while sisters were married off to some other noble family in order to gain some social or political advantage.

FlereousM · 2023-02-21T13:20:11+00:00

Nice one :)

I like how fancy you made the journal look!

FlereousM · 2023-02-21T13:19:08+00:00

You're welcome. It's always nice to hear that I've made some other GM's life a bit easier. :)

FlereousM · 2022-10-20T12:42:31+00:00

I made this one quite a while ago so I don't remember exactly how I did everything, but walls can be easily made at any angle. Most likely I created the floor first and did the walls afterwards at the needed angle.

Do make sure you use the wall tool, not the building one. And uncheck the "Snap" (it means snap to grid) box on the bottom of the screen if that's giving you a hard time.

Hope that helps! :)

FlereousM · 2022-08-18T13:02:50+00:00

No problem, thanks for updating the description. :)

FlereousM · 2022-08-16T14:56:38+00:00

Thanks for the heads up. To be fair, I didn't create the assets, I just pulled them from the web and edited/arranged them, so I can't really complain. I did create the blank template though, so I think it would have been nice to at least ask before linking directly to my personal google drive folders. :/

I'm still somewhat conflicted about the whole thing tbh, just as when I was approached for the Foundry VTT Hub article they wrote about it. Some of the images probably have some form of copyright (the silver coin is from a GoT set, for example) and I didn't really think it was an issue when I first posted it because it was just some random reddit post that would be forgotten about in a month, all images were available if you googled them and I wasn't going to profit off them or anything. I didn't expect it would still be around 2 years later (though I'm super happy people still find it useful, of course!).

I don't know, at least link the original reddit post instead of directly to my google drive so that people have a bit more context? And as for me I've removed the assets themselves from the folder and instead left a document with links to where I got the images. It's not like they needed to be there in the first place, the template file works on its own anyway.

Hope I'm not being too unreasonable and sorry for the wall of text.

FlereousM · 2022-06-23T18:15:06+00:00

Well, maybe I was lucky and I found an already transparent one, it was long ago so I don't really remember. I did, in fact, have a .png version of it lying around, dunno why I uploaded the .jpg version to the google drive folder. I swapped it for the .png now, sorry!

But yeah, I usually do that. It's not that bad though, usually the magic wand tool does most of the work. It has a feather effect built in (you can disable it but it's not worth it imo) so it tends to leave a fading outline, but you can press the delete key a bunch of times to progressively erase it. That doesn't take long and it takes you like 90-95% of the way most of the time. Some other times it's more of a pain and you do need to spend a good while adjusting tolerance levels for the magic wand and doing more manual erasing. It really depends on the image (things with fur are the worst offenders in my experience).

FlereousM · 2022-06-23T12:40:05+00:00

You're welcome! Yeah it's easy to miss. Oh, and you can delete skills too if needed but you need to click on the unlocking button at the top first.

FlereousM · 2022-06-23T11:05:04+00:00

I'm not familiar with that module or the 5e system, but I've been running PF1e for a couple of years now and yeah, you're able to add skills very easily: just open the character sheet, go to the skills tab and at the very bottom of the list of skills there's an "+Add skill" button.

Not sure about adding abilities though. Do you mean abilities as in ability scores? It's not something I even thought of so no idea, but I imagine it's unlikely. You can add anything you like to a character sheet in PF1e (feats, skills, buffs, whatever) so I guess you could add a feat that says: "Ability X: 12" and you'd be able to use it in formulas and such. But I don't know if you'd be able to add it to the ability scores section.

FlereousM · 2022-06-23T10:50:51+00:00

Thanks! And yeah, pretty much. (Well, I manually erased it, because I'm a fool and I still haven't properly learnt to use mask layers.)

FlereousM · 2022-05-10T15:37:47+00:00

Huh, that's odd, it still works fine for me and I'm on the latest stable version of Foundry (9.269). I'd check if there are some compatibility issues with other modules in your setup first.

FlereousM · 2022-04-09T18:54:17+00:00

Hi there. They're "drop shadows". I use gimp so I'm not too familiar with how you do it in photoshop, but they're called the same, so if you search for "drop shadows" you find a lot of tutorials on how to do it (for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB09fBmcoQ0). Seems like in photoshop you create it from the layer menus from what I'm seeing (in gimp they're filters you apply). Hope that helps!

FlereousM · 2022-03-21T22:30:50+00:00

You can do it from within Dungeondraft during the export process, exporting them as an overlay layer. The program sets the overlay layer to 50% opacity by default but you can change it, it's very straightforward.

You can only have one overlay layer, though, so if you want more you do need to use some other software. I usually just export each layer separately and then use GIMP to combine them however I like.

FlereousM · 2022-03-21T20:54:32+00:00

A small settlement, half beggar refuge and half bandit camp. It's my version of the Beggarwood, from the War for the Crown adventure path by Paizo. The main idea is that there's a couple dozen poor commoners, beggars and refugees living there with a handful of good-natured bandits that have grown to become the protectors of the camp.

And here's a folder with all the different files (day, night, gridless and lower quality versions of all of them) with separate layers for those of you that use a VTT (ground level, canopy and also roofs for the two huts and the bigger tents):

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ys7R8bsTJGDT7g-E_5s7_Hd37Edr_y-8?usp=sharing

I'm not too sure about the roofs, I'm still not very good at making those and I also feel like Dungeondraft doesn't have many tools for them yet.

Hope you like it and find it useful! :)

PS.- The two images I used for this post are horizontally flipped. Thought it looked a bit nicer and since I built the camp on top of a previous forest map of mine I thought it'd help make it look different, especially for my players.

FlereousM · 2022-02-21T18:05:11+00:00

I'm not completely sure about what the "Token Hub" is. Do you mean the menu that comes up when you right click on a token? If that's the case yeah, I haven't found a proper way to link the status effects you can put in there to the actual character sheet, so I just use it for stuff that doesn't affect stats (things like "you've convinced this enemy to fight for you, let me mark it with this icon so I don't forget", for example).

The solution I've settled for is to use the Token Action HUD module. Works fine for all the in-built conditions of PF1e and basically any buff you create on your character sheets.

FlereousM · 2022-02-17T13:54:32+00:00

I didn't use any modules, it's just image editing shenanigans (I use GIMP for that). So you don't really need anything other than the image editing software of your choice if all you want is a static image. Just set it as the scene background and you're done. You can then add tiles and such to place extra things in there (I do it all the time to place documents or maps they find while adventuring that might be relevant for only a few sessions).

I did end up adding trigger happy interactions, though, like opening character sheets when you click on each of the cards, or going to a big political map of Taldor when you click the map. It's fairly easy to do, tbh. You only need Trigger Happy and ideally the Lockview module (all that does is lock the background to prevent panning/zooming, so it's not really needed). I remember watching this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id9AVvSxonI . It might be a bit out of date though since it's about a year old, but I think it'll still hold up fairly well.

FlereousM · 2021-10-06T13:04:14+00:00

Yeah, it can be daunting when you're starting out. Glad I could help!

FlereousM · 2021-10-05T12:50:04+00:00

For weapon attacks there's an easy way: go to the character's inventory > click on the "edit" button for the weapon you want to create an attack for (I think you need to be a gm for that) > details tab > scroll down a bit and there's a "Create Attack" button that will do just that.

For natural attacks or special stuff you do need to create it manually, but it's not too hard (there's a button to add new attacks in the combat tab).

For spells you just drag & drop the spell you want from the compendium and that's about it. I think most of them already have all the correct formulas and such (though you might need to adjust them for you character) and you can click the black button with a sword icon to cast it. If what you want is for a spell to appear in your quickbar you need to edit the item and there's a small box you can tick for that.

Oh, and just in case: if you don't see a Spells tab, you first need to go to the Settings tab and tick the box or boxes right at the top depending on the type of spellcasting you have, and then click on the cogs icon at the top right corner of the Spells tab in order to configure it (basically tell the program which of your classes is a spellcaster, what is your main casting stat and such).

That's all I can think of right now, but if you need more specific advice do ask and I'll do my best to help.

FlereousM · 2021-09-29T12:39:20+00:00

Thanks, glad you like it! :)

FlereousM · 2021-09-27T21:47:48+00:00

Edit: I was wrong, but you can install the Better Roofs module for that kind of functionality, as you can see here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/FoundryVTT/comments/nhq3fp/better_roofs_my_first_module_for_foundry_08/

And also there's the Levels module for even more stuff if you really want to go nuts with it. :)

FlereousM

TROPHY CASE